Steve Jobs and the Art of Spectacle making.
Steve Jobs and the Art of Spectacle making.
I have changed my mind about ‘Apple’. Steve Jobs was a creative genius and may his soul rest in peace. I watched a program about Steve’s life on TV last night and it just blew me over.
If ever there was proof of ageing stultifying opinions, my previous haughty disdain for any gadget with little buttons, was in the pudding. The proof of the pudding is that very often, people with advancing years resist the jigging about of the younger ones and fresh ideas. It must be a form of dormant jealousy that pops up when it starts to dawn on us, that that’s it, the fag end of life is nigh. There is little I can do about it now except repent and try and improve, become tolerant of little buttons and their pushers. Perhaps take up dancing lessons or knitting.
Years ago, on the train chockers with passengers I once stood up for a woman who looked a bit pale and tired. I was perhaps seventeen and working for Spectacle Makers and Co, a company in Clarence Street. My job was to grind lenses to their prescribed specification. A horribly dirty job that included splashing slurry of water and fine grinding powder on the future lenses of chunks of glass that were fastened on a metal rotating chock with the use of hot tar. It was then a world of concave and convex measurements with strange and exotic workers initiating ceremonies involving blue ultramarine dye rubbed around the novice apprentices’ private parts.
When I stood up, gallantly offering my seat, I was astonished by the reply,’ do I look that bad, she said?’ I mumbled something like’ no-sorry, you look OK’. Of course, I moved carriages and never stood up since, even if they were pregnant and close to breaking waters. The world of convex surfaces taught me a lesson and pregnant women did not break my resolve to remain seated.
Some many years later, with the Balmain local ALP Branch firmly in the hands of right wing crooks and welders of steel containers smuggling drugs and importing loose women, I queued up to renew membership. Suddenly a few large burly blokes entered the Balmain Town-Hall. One came behind me and said ‘make room for a pregnant lady, you poofter.’ I retorted, ‘you are not pregnant and you are not even a woman but could be a poofter’.
Pandemonium broke out, especially when a fire extinguisher was pulled from the wall and hurled through the upstairs window. The police, who were next door never even turned up. They were in cahoots with the punch throwing right-wing thugs. All the women at the meeting turned pale. The member books were stolen, lights switched off and we all (the bleeding left wing faction) adjourned to the local William Wallace for schooners and solace. My bleeding nose was soothed by a woman called Elisabeth, I remember it still. My pain started to wane after the fourth schooner coinciding with Bridie King’s band starting up a wild and tempestuous blues number. It shows that the world of pregnant ladies and my cruel refusal to get up for them in trains finally caught up with me.
It came back to me on the train last week, this time between Mortdale and Central Station. There I was, standing up swaying amongst all the Iphone pushers and shakers. I was hoping a young person would get up and gallantly offer an elderly gent a seat. No, not even a hint of respect, they kept bent over their world of Apps and GPS’s. “It tells me I am on the train”, someone whispered to a friend; really, wow?
Perhaps pregnancy and old age used to be neck and neck during the past when it came to standing up in public transport.
I’ll try it on crutches next time or shall I just faint and dribble a bit?
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Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Of course, you’ve all heard the one about the optometrist who fell into a lens-grinder and made a spectacle of himself…?
🙂
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A commentator commentated in that manner that “says all” about Steve Jobs’ office, here was Steve Jobs’ considered to be ‘a hippy’ and running ‘a hippy outfit’ but to the contrary…
Efficiency, expectations, time oriented, anything but “laid back”… I can’t remember exactly the characteristics presented to illustrate what allegedly ‘a hippy’ is not, but my eyes glazed over and I lost traction, interest in watching, a bit of interest in living.
Wonderful article, Gerard. The title got me in first up. I loved the tumble of description that followed, the juxtaposition of modes of being, the present and its history told in the personal, industrial application and precision engineering, placement in politics in the particular and the incident in the queue.
The description of spectacle making is precious to me. My dad to help pay for his Ag Science degree at the University of Queensland worked for an optometrist in Queen Street, Brisbane. Eventually grinding the lenses, doing the particular work, learning how to test eyesight as well. I think I may have already indicated here at the bar of the Pigs Arms that towards the end of its accomplishment his boss offered him a partnership to ensure himself of a successor. Dad wanted to get outdoors again and face the challenge of making his way. He worked there late 1920s to, I think, 1931, Gerard.
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I worked grinding those lenses on a top floor of an old building, It was dark and the owner sat perched a bit higher so he could watch his men at work. The lenses were ground with a course abrasive medium first to the desired concave and convex curves. Than they would be finished with a very fine powder. The lenses had to be perfectly studied under a magnifying glass and were not allowed to have any pins or blemishes. If the slurry was too dry or you took your eyes of the job, the lenses would overheat and get ruined.
The worst job was heating the tar mixture that would fix the glass chunks onto the metal chuck. The place was smokey and very dirty, dingy. Charles Dickens must have been still alive.
The strangest thing was the initiating of new apprentices, terrible. They would be grabbed by the adults, at a previously agreed time, dragged to the dressing room and get their overall pulled off and then, as a kind of grand finale, have their genitals smeared with a Ultramarine blue dye which was difficult to remove.
It was very common during that time and went on in many factories. I suppose a kind of buggering that also went on in English Private Boarding Schools.
I feel that explains a lot about so many bullying tactics that go on in politics and our attitude to refugees. You give back what was meted out to you.
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Nicely presented and considered (I almost foolishishly said speculated).
I was as far as I knew the only woman who refused to get out of bed in my dorm for the fresher orientation at a Women’s College when I lived-in but I was naive. I certainly didn’t know at that ‘new’ moment the reality someone had been drowned in the lake at the University as a resut of an allegedly fresher oriented prank, but I got the idea of what could happen before I heard that recently then old news. I knew nothing of this sort of behaviour. When I learned it happened elsewhere, not only was I glad I am made of obdurate stuff when it comes to bullying, attempts to make me confess anything I am naive of, towards being goaded as I was as a fresher at Teacher’s Training College, I understand the gamut of what places me in fact where I ‘am’ today, aware o the damage. I have to extract myself out of totally destructive situations and another person less subjected to the years of bullying I have been can more quickly, immediately assess the likelihood of bullies/bullying. Bullying, too, creates bullying. Holding onto my own integrity and escaping cycles is a life long pursuit.
In regard to your specific experience in that instance, I consider it reprehensible alone and that when I was at University first I was dismayed, emotionally gutted, revulsed, to learn fresher men from neighbouring Colleges were subjected to what you described and stripped of their clothes, dropped out of vehicles at remote locations from their College, singly, to find their way back to their so-called ‘home. I was very unhappy Gez at University College, living in that environment.
My thesis on the current situation has been that the pressure of classroom crowded baby boomers and intensely high levels of competition accelerating over the years (the stink of sardine sandwiches at close quarters) has bred this disdain for integrity and consideration of principle, the drive to escape, get out, succeed in a crowded market place, competition for scarce jobs, inadequate education, and the post-war repetition of Movietone News reels teaching 5 year olds how to physically and emotionally torture their fellows.
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…I wondered about the second half of the title…now I know…to do with spectacles, not with Steve Job……..
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Your kindness is boundless. The painters union used to be a real fighters union in past days. Weren’t they called painters and dockers? Here something from the past:( Wiki)
Union Secretary Pat Shannon copped three bullets in his chest (1973)
“You c—” were his last words before getting assassinated at a South Melbourne hotel. Billy “The Texan” Longley, a bitter union rival, would serve more than a decade for ordering the hit. A second man, Kevin Taylor, was put away for pulling the trigger. While in the clink, Longley’s spray on union corruption sparked a royal commission. A third, Gary Harding, who tipped off the cops about the pair, would get much worse
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What is it with union meetings (at least manly ones, not the nurses’ one) and schooies? My uncle was an organiser in the painters’ union, and an extraordinary meeting was always prefixed by. “Down brushes lads, we’re off for a schooner!”
I’m thinking that the reason that the younger folk don’t offer you a seat on the train Gez, is that you don’t look old!
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